The thing is, this isn't a "real" tax. It's like your car's mechanic charging you a $3 "environmental protection fee" when he works on your car. Just who does he pay that "fee" to? Nobody. He's just marking up your bill saying "Hey, all these hazardous waste disposal costs are eating into my profits, so I'm rasing my rates for everything to make up for it."
Vonage isn't actually turning this $1.50 a month over to any tax authority, they're just blaming tis price increase on all the government-imposed things they have to do because they're getting treated like a phone company now.
It's really just a way of saying "Your price is going up $1.50 a month, but we'd like to blame it on the government." It's really a practice the FTC should step in on...
.com and.net are the two huge TLDs, so implementing wildcard sites on smaller TLDs just wasn't quite as outragious. Also, in the past, most wildcards were sites that only offered to register the non-existing domain at the monopoly registrar of that TLD.
The controversy on SiteFinder seems to be that they're offering query-based ads, which essentially says "It's against the rules to register the typo of your competitor, but we'll sell you an ad on the site that results from that typo."
Google doesn't assume the bulk of the storage and bandwidth requirements under HTTP, and it's real easy to distrubute such with round robin DNS and/or mirroring.
The Internet at its core is peer to peer... By the basic protocols, any computer can be a client and a server at the same time.
But the term "P2P" has evolved to include identity-hiding features because afterall Napster got killed becuase it ran a central server, and if a "P2P" client did identify its users in any easily tracable way there'd be a mass-mailing of subpeonas. That is what seperates HTTP from "P2P" right now in most people's minds, and why it's so easy to run a P2P share than compared to a web server (at least, a web server popular enough that it gets the attention of Google) on your Mac and not get caught as a copyright violator.
Right. Most people who post copyright-violating material on a website get shut down by their web host not because of the copyright threat, but because they're off the wall on outbound bandwidth and the provider doesn't mind the easy excuse to kill the account they don't like anyway.
Now, it's the "The Industry launched a multi-zillion suit against a baby" headline... when really it's all the same thing.
Re:de-TV Geeked translation
on
Telstar 4 is Down
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· Score: 2, Informative
It's not the TV headends that are in trouble, it's the one-off situations. For example, Muzak had a lot of feeds on T4, and each and every customer site has one dish pointed at T4 and no easy way to move it. Those sites are gonna be without their Muzak until a techie comes out to manually reaim that dish... that's the pain in the neck.
Re:This may affect you because
on
Telstar 4 is Down
·
· Score: 3, Informative
ABC and CBS will never be the ones scrabling for space... it's very common for big-money TV networks (be they mainstream or porn) to have a contract that says if the usual dedicated transponder is gone, they immedately get to take over a specific transponder on another satellite from the company.
Those transponder slots that are targeted by such an agreement are used for short-term "pre-emptable" uses, such as a TV station that needs to broadcast two or three live news reports from another city, or maybe even a small-time sports game. Those people are outta luck on a day like this, because they're gonna get bumped.
Re:So what does this mean to the average user?
on
Telstar 4 is Down
·
· Score: 2, Informative
If the end user notices something's missing today, that company's likely not coming back. See, satellites are like computer hard drives... they're gonna break eventually, the only question is when.
So, anybody who's actually making money with their satellite usage has made backup contracts that say when T4 goes down, they immedately get moved to another spot to become their full-time home. For example, I've seen elsewhere that several pron channels that were on Telestar 4 got moved to Telestar 6. The problem comes for whomever thought they were gonna be using those slots on T6... 1. They better make sure they don't accidently relay a porn channel, 2. They better find another place to send whatever they were gonna be sending.
Eventually the ripple effect goes to the end of the line where somebody just might find themselves with nowhere to go. They're the ones out of business because even if they can find another place to go in a few days, they've lost all credibility.
If you're in the telecom industry, it's a newsworthy event because the overall satellite bandwith that reaches the CONUS (Contentential USA) area took a downward hit this morning. Clearly, all of the signals that moved accross T4 are gonna need to relocate elsewhere.
However, most of the major users of such a big satellite like national TV/Radio concerns know that it's only a matter of time before something like this happens to a satellite, so they've got automatic switchovers at their affiliates that keep them flowing even if a network show is on at the time. The problem comes to anybody who has "preemptable" satellite space for today, because they may just find themselves hit somebody who's willing to pay the premium fee to bump them. Other users in a pinch might just send something that normally goes over a satellite through landlines today, etc.
It's a major sudden redirection of large ammounts of traffic in the national communication infrastructure, although not exactly earth shaking because most people won't see much of a disruption. (Galaxy IV was a bit more newsworthy fo a failure a few years ago because it took out most of SkyTel's pagers...)
So, it's interesting to some people and other people don't care. Isn't that what/. is all about?
No web hosting account anywhere should be offered with unlimited bandwidth and unlimited storage... you're just asking for abuse if that's your offer. There should be an enforced HD quota, and an enforced bandwidth quota. Once the user hits it, they're either running the expensive meter or shutdown. Simple enough, the users brought on this problem, the users should be the ones feeling the pain.
Some $9.95 a month websites don't even get a "real" user once per hour. So, for them that'd be a sudden multiple of traffic...
What this really smells like is a webhost who oversold their server on the theory that everybody would never take their accounts to the promised limits at the same time, and then that's just what happened and the webhost got exposed as not being able to handle it...
If their customer list is so insecure that a untrustworthy 3rd party has it now, then their customers really need the services of a security company.:)
Of course, a webhost also needs to communicate what their customers are paying for. If you claim unlimited bandwidth for $9.95 a month, don't be surprised when somebody takes you up on it. These customers should have had some sort of bandwidth limit where the overmonitoring would cause their site to get defaced with the webhost's "This site has exceeded it's bandwidth limit, come back next month!" page or start running up a huge bill. The customers should know better not to invite such an attack on the server, and should be the ones feeling the pain. That'll put this monitoring company out of business in a hurry...
If there was damage to your business, the simply take them to court. More than likely with that kind of leverage you can come to some sort of agreement and drop the case once they come to a new agreement or give you a settlement and you find a different company.
How do we get RTFA failures on Ask Slashdot when it's on in the page. This guy didn't ask for this company... his webhosting customers did. He's got to convince his customers that this monitoring company isn't worth their money, because it overmonitors to the point that it creates its own downtimes.
Not quite such an open and shut case. They produce an equal number of accounts that they have with users on GeoCities that are receiving the same level of "testing", and then what do you do?
Unfortnately, we're missing a key part of proving the "protection racket" scheme here, proof that the monitoring company illegally got ahold of a customer list. If this company just spread by word of mouth though the customers and advertising aimed at webmasters in general, then there's nothing illegal and they'll defend themselves by tar and feathering the webhosting operation for not being able to handle the level of trafic they promised the customers.
The customers should have run up huge bandwidth bills by causing their traffic to suddenly multiply by thousands with the auto-checking for site defacement (trans: re-spidering their site at an insane rate), and that'd be the way to recoup costs and then come off as the good guys by waiving thousands in excess fees...
Your system should have been set up to attribute the log file to the disk space of each client, causing them to eventually hit their limit and lose their abilty to log any further. No set of requests from the outside world should be able to bring down your server short of a vicious DOS attack, which clearly this wasn't. This was a an overload level of legit traffic, if your server can't handle it then you need a better server.
You should be able to create a few new services and convince your clients that they don't need to pay a 3rd party to monitor their server, that you can tell them all they need to know, and besides that you don't go down anyway.:)
It would have been an absoulte fiasco if one of your customers were to attract a Slashdotting...
That's not what BIND is doing. BIND is allowing a config file to declare specific domains for which wildcards are not allowed unless further quantified, and setting the defaults for that to be "*.com" and "*.net". A listed TLD is not allowed to use wildcards, but subdomains within the TLD would be, so *.theircompany.com would still be allowed.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing is, this isn't a "real" tax. It's like your car's mechanic charging you a $3 "environmental protection fee" when he works on your car. Just who does he pay that "fee" to? Nobody. He's just marking up your bill saying "Hey, all these hazardous waste disposal costs are eating into my profits, so I'm rasing my rates for everything to make up for it."
Vonage isn't actually turning this $1.50 a month over to any tax authority, they're just blaming tis price increase on all the government-imposed things they have to do because they're getting treated like a phone company now.
Itemizing what? They're charging a $1.50 blob without showing just where that number was arrived at...
It's really just a way of saying "Your price is going up $1.50 a month, but we'd like to blame it on the government." It's really a practice the FTC should step in on...
.com and .net are the two huge TLDs, so implementing wildcard sites on smaller TLDs just wasn't quite as outragious. Also, in the past, most wildcards were sites that only offered to register the non-existing domain at the monopoly registrar of that TLD.
The controversy on SiteFinder seems to be that they're offering query-based ads, which essentially says "It's against the rules to register the typo of your competitor, but we'll sell you an ad on the site that results from that typo."
Pay to whom? Verisign is the one who collects wholesale fees from all of the registration services...
Because the RIAA had a much easier time driving web-based sharing to extinction...
Google doesn't assume the bulk of the storage and bandwidth requirements under HTTP, and it's real easy to distrubute such with round robin DNS and/or mirroring.
The Internet at its core is peer to peer... By the basic protocols, any computer can be a client and a server at the same time.
But the term "P2P" has evolved to include identity-hiding features because afterall Napster got killed becuase it ran a central server, and if a "P2P" client did identify its users in any easily tracable way there'd be a mass-mailing of subpeonas. That is what seperates HTTP from "P2P" right now in most people's minds, and why it's so easy to run a P2P share than compared to a web server (at least, a web server popular enough that it gets the attention of Google) on your Mac and not get caught as a copyright violator.
HTTP with Google is the same as P2P with a central directory.
Right. Most people who post copyright-violating material on a website get shut down by their web host not because of the copyright threat, but because they're off the wall on outbound bandwidth and the provider doesn't mind the easy excuse to kill the account they don't like anyway.
Now, it's the "The Industry launched a multi-zillion suit against a baby" headline... when really it's all the same thing.
It's not the TV headends that are in trouble, it's the one-off situations. For example, Muzak had a lot of feeds on T4, and each and every customer site has one dish pointed at T4 and no easy way to move it. Those sites are gonna be without their Muzak until a techie comes out to manually reaim that dish... that's the pain in the neck.
ABC and CBS will never be the ones scrabling for space... it's very common for big-money TV networks (be they mainstream or porn) to have a contract that says if the usual dedicated transponder is gone, they immedately get to take over a specific transponder on another satellite from the company.
Those transponder slots that are targeted by such an agreement are used for short-term "pre-emptable" uses, such as a TV station that needs to broadcast two or three live news reports from another city, or maybe even a small-time sports game. Those people are outta luck on a day like this, because they're gonna get bumped.
If the end user notices something's missing today, that company's likely not coming back. See, satellites are like computer hard drives... they're gonna break eventually, the only question is when.
So, anybody who's actually making money with their satellite usage has made backup contracts that say when T4 goes down, they immedately get moved to another spot to become their full-time home. For example, I've seen elsewhere that several pron channels that were on Telestar 4 got moved to Telestar 6. The problem comes for whomever thought they were gonna be using those slots on T6... 1. They better make sure they don't accidently relay a porn channel, 2. They better find another place to send whatever they were gonna be sending.
Eventually the ripple effect goes to the end of the line where somebody just might find themselves with nowhere to go. They're the ones out of business because even if they can find another place to go in a few days, they've lost all credibility.
If you're in the telecom industry, it's a newsworthy event because the overall satellite bandwith that reaches the CONUS (Contentential USA) area took a downward hit this morning. Clearly, all of the signals that moved accross T4 are gonna need to relocate elsewhere.
/. is all about?
However, most of the major users of such a big satellite like national TV/Radio concerns know that it's only a matter of time before something like this happens to a satellite, so they've got automatic switchovers at their affiliates that keep them flowing even if a network show is on at the time. The problem comes to anybody who has "preemptable" satellite space for today, because they may just find themselves hit somebody who's willing to pay the premium fee to bump them. Other users in a pinch might just send something that normally goes over a satellite through landlines today, etc.
It's a major sudden redirection of large ammounts of traffic in the national communication infrastructure, although not exactly earth shaking because most people won't see much of a disruption. (Galaxy IV was a bit more newsworthy fo a failure a few years ago because it took out most of SkyTel's pagers...)
So, it's interesting to some people and other people don't care. Isn't that what
And when backs do start acting foolish, they get hit by federal regulators. The banking industry is one where cutting corners simply isn't allowed.
There's an idea for the computer makers... call a 1000MB unit 8Gb :)
No web hosting account anywhere should be offered with unlimited bandwidth and unlimited storage... you're just asking for abuse if that's your offer. There should be an enforced HD quota, and an enforced bandwidth quota. Once the user hits it, they're either running the expensive meter or shutdown. Simple enough, the users brought on this problem, the users should be the ones feeling the pain.
Some $9.95 a month websites don't even get a "real" user once per hour. So, for them that'd be a sudden multiple of traffic...
What this really smells like is a webhost who oversold their server on the theory that everybody would never take their accounts to the promised limits at the same time, and then that's just what happened and the webhost got exposed as not being able to handle it...
If their customer list is so insecure that a untrustworthy 3rd party has it now, then their customers really need the services of a security company. :)
Of course, a webhost also needs to communicate what their customers are paying for. If you claim unlimited bandwidth for $9.95 a month, don't be surprised when somebody takes you up on it. These customers should have had some sort of bandwidth limit where the overmonitoring would cause their site to get defaced with the webhost's "This site has exceeded it's bandwidth limit, come back next month!" page or start running up a huge bill. The customers should know better not to invite such an attack on the server, and should be the ones feeling the pain. That'll put this monitoring company out of business in a hurry...
If there was damage to your business, the simply take them to court. More than likely with that kind of leverage you can come to some sort of agreement and drop the case once they come to a new agreement or give you a settlement and you find a different company.
How do we get RTFA failures on Ask Slashdot when it's on in the page. This guy didn't ask for this company... his webhosting customers did. He's got to convince his customers that this monitoring company isn't worth their money, because it overmonitors to the point that it creates its own downtimes.
Not quite such an open and shut case. They produce an equal number of accounts that they have with users on GeoCities that are receiving the same level of "testing", and then what do you do?
Unfortnately, we're missing a key part of proving the "protection racket" scheme here, proof that the monitoring company illegally got ahold of a customer list. If this company just spread by word of mouth though the customers and advertising aimed at webmasters in general, then there's nothing illegal and they'll defend themselves by tar and feathering the webhosting operation for not being able to handle the level of trafic they promised the customers.
The customers should have run up huge bandwidth bills by causing their traffic to suddenly multiply by thousands with the auto-checking for site defacement (trans: re-spidering their site at an insane rate), and that'd be the way to recoup costs and then come off as the good guys by waiving thousands in excess fees...
Your system should have been set up to attribute the log file to the disk space of each client, causing them to eventually hit their limit and lose their abilty to log any further. No set of requests from the outside world should be able to bring down your server short of a vicious DOS attack, which clearly this wasn't. This was a an overload level of legit traffic, if your server can't handle it then you need a better server.
:)
You should be able to create a few new services and convince your clients that they don't need to pay a 3rd party to monitor their server, that you can tell them all they need to know, and besides that you don't go down anyway.
It would have been an absoulte fiasco if one of your customers were to attract a Slashdotting...
That's not what BIND is doing. BIND is allowing a config file to declare specific domains for which wildcards are not allowed unless further quantified, and setting the defaults for that to be "*.com" and "*.net". A listed TLD is not allowed to use wildcards, but subdomains within the TLD would be, so *.theircompany.com would still be allowed.